I’ve been in denial about this for quite some time, hoping that I could put some more time into this blog, imagining the ways that I could make it better.  As of this week, Puzzlinks has been in existence for three years.  It was time to do some evaluation about what the future of the site would hold and I have decided not to continue.  I just can’t put enough time into the blog to make it as good as it should be and there are plenty of other great puzzle blogs out there.  (Passion For Puzzles, SmartKit, The Griddle, and su.doku.es, to name just a few.)  I have no intention of taking down the site, I just won’t be posting to it anymore.

I’ve had a lot of fun running puzzlinks and I think that the last three years have been great ones to run a puzzle blog.  Shortly after I started, there was the Starbucks crossword competition and then the Google Da Vinci Code puzzle competition.  We witnessed the rise and fall of Perplex City and the documentary Wordplay turned cruciverbalists into celebrities.  It’s not easy to turn away from this project, but I know that it’s the right decision for me.

So long, everyone, and thanks for reading.

We have a new site banner for puzzlinks.com, courtesy of Dave Millar over at The Griddle.  It’s been ages since I’ve done anything cosmetic with the site, so I appreciate the new look.  Click through and check it out.  Also check out Dave’s site (if you haven’t already.)

Just Crosswords is another great site for crossword lovers.  It’s got about 300 free crossword puzzles on it grouped into variously themed categories.  The puzzles can be played on the site in your browser, using a web applet that’s pretty well done.  The down side is that most of the puzzle grids are not terrible dense, in that they have quite a lot of black spaces in them.  And, as with most free crossword puzzles, the difficulty level is not terribly high.

A year ago today, I made my first post on Puzzlinks.com. To celebrate the first birthday of this site, I’ve given it a new look. Interestingly, after changing page layout a few times in the past year, the links are once again in the left sidebar (along with everything else.) And I’m still looking for a better way to organize them.

I release the content of this site under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license which allows reader to do what they want with it as long as they attribute me and don’t sell derivative works.

Recently, I found the site of someone who is doing just that. Otto Janko at janko.at has written a little java applet interface for my mochikoro puzzles (and those of some others as well.) Here’s a direct link to one of my puzzles. I’m excited to see my work improved upon in this way and I think this is a great example of what the creative commons is all about.

I have updated last Monday’s Mochikoro puzzle such that it has a unique solution.  If you click over, you’ll see that it has changed.

Reader Jason Dyer enjoyed the puzzle concept for Lost Bridges, but he was annoyed that there was more than one solution.  So, he made up his own lost bridges puzzle with a unique solution.  You can find it on his blog.

Also, I’ve updated my earlier post to contain the pdf and the second solution.

I’ve added a new category for puzzle related products like t-shirts, etc. I’ve also shifted my posts around in other categories as well. In so doing, I’ve realized that there are some serious gray areas. First, the “website” category: Yes, all of my posts link to websites. The website category is reserved for posts whose central theme is a specific site. Second, there is some overlap when we’re talking about puzzles and games, and I have a category for both. Of course everything in the game category is a puzzle related game. The question really is what do I classify as a game.  For most things the distinction is easy: crossword-not a game; hapland-game; planarity-????

So here’s a question, if any care to respond.  What constitutes a puzzle game and how is that different from a normal puzzle?

After a weeks worth of posts I think I have the categories for this blog set.  My original plan of categorizing by puzzle type just seems too unwieldy.  Here are the new categories, with a brief description:

1. Puzzlinks – anything related to this blog specifically (like this post.)
2. Puzzle – an actual puzzle or a link to a site with the puzzle described in the entry.
3. Game – a description or review a puzzle based game.
4. Contest/Competition – news relating to a puzzle competition or puzzle based contest.
5. Website – information about a puzzle related website.
6. In the news – puzzle-themed news stories from around the web.
7. Types/Variations – discussions of specific types of puzzles or interesting variations on common puzzle types.

Puzzlinks.com is a new blog dedicated to puzzles of all kinds. I will also be collecting links to puzzle sites all over the web. Currently, the links are categorized and listed in the left sidebar. New links will be added all the time and, in the coming weeks, I’m hoping to devise a better way of searching the links that I’ve collected.

So stay tuned! There’s more to come.